Word: inept
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ultimately, a spectator at the trial announces that Goldman is really a Jew [the telltale SS tattoo in his armpit urns out to be a self-inflicted cigar burn). This denouement makes the playwright seem like a bumbling amateur and the Israeli secret agents as incredibly inept. Goldman, it appears, was a kind of Christ-surrogate who wanted to be martyred so that his people might feel that some fitting atonement had been made for the monstrous wrongs done them. But Shaw's conception of martyrdom makes it seem less a matter of conscience that an attention-getting device...
Smith characterizes his trial as a hurry-up affair, marred by an inept defense and an inexperienced judge in a lynchlike atmosphere. Crucial facts, such as fixing the time of death, were botched by his attorney. The case against him, Smith suggests, was founded on shoddy police investigatory work and was somewhat in the nature of a frameup. The actual bases of his many appeals for a rehearing and retrial, which have kept him alive these many years, involve improper trial procedures and the applicability of the Supreme Court rulings regarding forced confession and post-indictment police interrogations...
...fact, Millionaire Fulbright had been so unworried by the outcome that he spent little for newspaper ads or TV time. Archsegregationist Jim Johnson, a two-time loser for the governorship and Fulbright's most visible foe, proved as inept as he was intemperate. Running against Fulbright's opposition to the Viet Nam war, Johnson branded the Senator a traitor and a coward. So virulent was Johnson's campaign that Arkansas Negroes, though well aware that Fulbright has never voted for a major civil rights bill, had nowhere else...
...King's chief lieutenants for more than a decade, Abernathy has staked out a claim as custodian of the dream. Whether that claim will go unchallenged remains to be seen. Far less cerebral than his predecessor, he has shown an unhappy tendency to make inept remarks and to accept bad advice from ultramilitant S.C.L.C. officials whom King managed to keep in line...
FROM what their sources of information have told them, the liberal activists see SDS's recent actions as embarrassingly inept. First they thought SDS claims that Harvard's tuition was being used to preserve class structure within the University were paranoid and irrational. Second, the media told them that SDS was sabotaging Eugene McCarthy (the liberal activist candidate) in Wisconsin. Third, they saw the SDS demonstration that cost Boston University $500,000 in "bad" money us a misdirected, simply sensational protest which was neither practical nor sincere. If SDS really cared about slumlords, they asked, why did they wait until...